Busker by Liam Murray Bell

Author:Liam Murray Bell [Liam Murray Bell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908434388
Publisher: Myriad Editions
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Several hours pass before we speak again. In the meantime, I’ve dozed on the bench and Sage has ventured out with the last of our money to get provisions. As the grey early-morning light turns golden, he stands at the bar and rattle-boils water on the stove.

‘Tea?’ he asks, holding up a tin can.

‘What’s that?’

‘I raided next door’s recycling. This one was beans; the other was soup.’

‘Tea would be nice, thanks.’

He nods and sets about pouring. His movements are hunched and hurried, with the wild wisps of his newly clean beard and the trailing cuffs of his once-white shirt giving him the look of a mad scientist at work. The concoction he hands me, though, is definitely tea – hot, milky and sweetened by sugar.

‘Now,’ he says, ‘how about some breakfast?’

It’s my stomach that answers, with a rising groan that sounds like a question.

‘Porridge,’ Sage replies. ‘The food of your forefathers, Rab. It’s cheap, it’s nutritious and, with a bit of milk and sugar added, it’s just about bearable.’

‘OK.’ I smile as a memory comes back to me from childhood. I’m unsure how to bring it up; it’s only rarely that I volunteer information about the past. ‘Let me…’ I start. ‘My granny… she lived up in St Margaret’s Hope, on the Orkney Islands… and she used to have a drawer, in a wooden chest of drawers, that was lined with greaseproof paper and then filled with porridge oats. Cooked, covered with treacle. When we visited, she would open the drawer and cut me a slice. And once the drawer was empty she’d just refill it and leave it to set.’

‘Like flapjack,’ Sage says.

‘And my mum always tells the story that, after one of our trips north to see her, I came back and pulled the clothes out of all the closets, wardrobes and drawers in my parents’ room because I was looking for – ’

‘ – the flapjack,’ Sage finishes the sentence.

‘Exactly.’ I nod. ‘So this brings back some memories for me.’

Sage looks at me over the ice-bucket, through the steam, and smiles. He is using the broken hand-whisk from beneath the bar to stir the oats. From time to time he adds a splash of milk from the carton beside him.

‘Sage?’ I say, softly.

‘Yes?’

‘Is she the reason you left the university?’

‘Who?’

‘Emma Scribbles.’

‘Scribbens,’ he corrects me. He sets down the whisk and lets out a sigh. The steam disperses and I see his face clearly as he shakes his head. His eyebrows hang low, shadowing his eyes. ‘It wasn’t her, no. I just ran out of funding, pure and simple. At the end of my three years, I ran out of money.’

‘Did you not have a contract, though?’

‘I had a three-year contract,’ he says. ‘But it was based on me finishing my research within the three years and… well, I didn’t, and they didn’t offer me anything or help me out in any way… so I had no way, really, to continue.’

‘So what about all the work you’d done over the three years?’

He shakes his head.

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